How to Anonymize Your Browsing with a Tor-Powered Raspberry Pi

2 years ago

What You Need

You don’t need anything special to make a Tor-powered Pi proxy, but you will need to round up a few materials before you get started:

You’ll want to go ahead and set up your SD card with Raspbian and set up SSH as well. You can use either the standard version of Raspbian or the Lite version, as you’ll only be using the command line for this guide. Follow our guide here to set up Raspbian (be sure to change your default password during this process) and this guide to enable SSH if you want to talk to your Raspberry Pi from any computer on your home network. Once you’ve gathered everything together, make sure your Raspberry Pi is connected directly to your router with an ethernet cable, then go ahead and plug it in.

Step One: Install the Necessary Software

The first thing we’ll need to do is make the Raspberry Pi 3’s Wi-Fi capable of acting like an access point. This turns it into a hotspot so you’ll be able to connect to it from your main computer just like you would any wireless network. We’ll be doing all this from the Raspberry Pi’s command line:

Type in sudo apt-get update and press Enter.

Type in sudo apt-get install iptables-persistent git

Select Yes and press Enter the two times you’re prompted to.

Now that everything’s been downloaded and installed, it’s time to set it up.

Step Two: Turn Your Raspberry Pi Into An Access Point

The process for turning a Raspberry Pi into an access point is a bit complicated, but thankfully GitHub user harryallerston created a script that automates the whole process.

Once it’s complete, your Raspberry Pi will reboot and should now work as an access point. You can test this out by heading to another computer or phone, selecting your Raspberry Pi from the Wi-Fi network list, and seeing if the internet works. If for some reason it does not, Adafruit has a guide for doing this all manually. Otherwise, continue on and install the Tor proxy software.

Step Five: Install TOR

Tor has a pretty straight-forward set up process, but you’ll still need to tweak a few things to get it working.

Type in sudo apt-get install tor and press Enter.

Type in sudo nano /etc/tor/torrc and press Enter. Scroll all the way to the bottom of the document and enter the text below into the text file. When you’re done, press Ctrl+X to save and continue:

Now, it’s time to finally start Tor. Type in sudo service tor start and press Enter. Then, type in sudo service tor status to make sure it’s working properly. If you don’t see any error codes, it’s working. You can set it up to launch automatically at startup by typing in sudo update-rc.d tor enable then pressing Enter.

When that’s finished, go ahead and reboot one more time. Type in sudo reboot and press Enter. Your Raspberry Pi should now launch everything automatically on startup.

Step Five: Connect and Browse with Your New TOR Proxy

Now, all you need to do is connect any device you want to browse anonymously on to your new Raspberry Pi Wi-Fi network. Both your regular home Wi-Fi and this one will exist, so select this as you would any Wi-Fi network. When you’re connected, head to https://check.torproject.org/ to verify that you’re on the Tor network. Enjoy your slow, but anonymous internet!